Showing posts with label political philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political philosophy. Show all posts

Friday, February 28, 2014

Anatomization of Progressive Adaptability and Cyclicality

 
The following is excerpted from a comment left on a post on this neo-reactionary blog post: http://www.xenosystems.net/quote-notes-64/.
The comment's author is the proprietor of another neo-reactionary blog: http://handleshaus.com/
Handle shows how progressivism has religious characteristics, but is a religion without a central authoritative text or a single locus of human authority. Consequently, it is maximally adaptable, manipulable, survivable, keeping in power those ruthless enough to ride its snaky path--but its perfunctory logic and its unprincipled basis in rhetoric leave it with minimal social, economic, military, or any other sort of optimality. Note, by the by, that the best of the neo-reactionary blogs attract comments of a higher quality than most articles in standard publications--and, as mostly pseudonymous writers, they even find the freedom to trample presently protected political fetishes--when such impede the search for truth or amusement.

Handle's Comment:
The strongest belief systems is one that can change opportunistically without admitting its changing, pretend it is part of a continuous tradition without resembling even its recent forbears, and become absolutely impervious to criticism or falsification. Like a religion.
I think the ACA-hours thing is a good example of what you see a lot of progressive writers do, and what Yglesias is particularly skilled at doing first.
The pattern of any particular debate is:
1. Progressives develop policy goal A, and implementation B.
2. Opposition says that B will cause negative trade-off or unintended consequence C – that Progressives themselves currently accept as negative, or at least something that is seen by most of the public as negative.
3. Sometimes the argument goes further and deeper with the Opposition saying anyB that is trying to accomplish A leads to C, there’s just no way around it.
4. At first Progressives deny B->C. But that is sometimes falsifiable, or just a total howler.
5. Then Progressives say, well, ok C, which is bad, but A is worth it. This is a matter of subjective valuation, which is why is it a dead-end for discourse, spinning around the same cul-de-sac forever.
6. And if that’s not satisfactory, then someone like Yglesias notices the obvious solution to the problem which is just to come along and say, “Actually, C is a good thing, or at least it has a bright side which we’re ignoring and which can trump the negative side. Only stupid people caught in dead-ends don’t see this. We should have more C! The burden of proof should now shift to people who are opposed to C!” This is the ultimate in ‘spin’ – and ‘flipping the script’ is why we call it spin.
7. And then everybody else suddenly realizes the immense power for winning the debate behind adopting a new set of beliefs where C is a good thing, and a day after Yglesias does it, I see a dozen other high-Alexa county writers repeat it. All of a sudden, the frame of debate shifts and the desirability of C is new dead-end, and the ratchet proceeds one notch at the expense of replacing a former progressive belief with a more useful new one – an adaptive mutation.
An example is the recent minimum wage stuff: The CBO came out and said it would mean less jobs in the midst of a weak labor market for the low-skilled. Since the CBO is progressive gospel – they can’t afford to criticize the number and ruin the credibility of a source they constantly use as a weapon. And all sides agree fewer jobs in this situation is bad, right?
And then, suddenly:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/18/cbo_minimum_wage_hike_would_cost_jobs.html
The outcome that the CBO is forecasting—an outcome where you get a small amount of disemployment that’s vastly outweighed by the increase in income among low-wage families writ large—is the outcome that you want.
A minimum wage hike with a small but real disemployment impact is the minimum wage hike you want.
Then it tweets and tumbls and reblogs all over the place. Now the question shifts to ‘what’s the ‘optimal’ number of job losses for a minimum wage hike to maximize ‘prosperity’, which, yeah, is kind of a fuzzy, manipulable notion, but what we were really always shooting for.
Tyler Cowen pushes back against the avalanche here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/the-cbo-report-on-the-minimum-wage.html
This is a perverse kind of Bayesianism where the policy cart is driving the ideology horse. One begins with subjective ideology and an empirical theory of policy implementation. When the data proves your theory produces results that are ideological negatives, then you just switch the valence to positive in your belief system. The means become the ends. Raising the minimum wage isn’t good because it redistributes more wealth from capital to labor without causing unemployment or inflation, raising the minimum wage is good in itself, and if disemployment and inflation are the results then they are also now positives we should have slightly more of.
Once you witness these progressivism adaptive mutation-cycles occur a few dozens of times a year (at least), you realize that change is the only constant

Monday, October 21, 2013

Men's Rights and the Anatomy of Reaction

 
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/women-battle-online-anti-women-hate-manosphere/story?id=20579038
The Southern Poverty Law Center--a bunch of commies, jews, fags, and slags who've appointed and proclaimed themselves supra-Christian accusers of all evil in this world, holier than Jesus--think Chateau Heartiste and other assorted bloggers who operate from a realistic male perspective are evil, violent, malicious, mendacious. The "manosphere" is increasingly a branch of the "reactosphere" since (except the Christian reactionaries) both are grounded in reality--a reality which both political parties deny. When the leftist media comes down on you, it's a sign of headway. Also, a lesser light among the lefties just did a typically incompetent and inaccurate hit piece on Nick Land, the British philosopher who writes "Outside In." If you look at the map of Dark Enlightenment thinkers below, the connections are telling: with the exception of the Christians, all of these groupings revolve around some key aspect of reality that the Left denies or omits. Eight groups are listed, three count:

1. Techno-Capitalists,
2. Ethno-Nationalists,
3. Christian Traditionalists.

The relations among these three are predictably problematic. In theory the first and second or the second and third could come to terms in formulating a new dispensation--though difficulties abound. But, the first and third can only clash. Of course, 'twas was not always so. In centuries past capitalist and techno were not so tightly aligned, and capitalism itself is not an existential threat to Christian life and thought. Catallaxy is not anti-Christian. But, in these days of genetic engineering and evolutionary science, of neurological pharmacopeias and expanding machine intelligence--the technological underpinnings of twenty-first century capitalism represent conceptual catastrophes for Christian theology. In practice, it may be that two camps will coalesce--the Techno-capitalists with some sympathetic Ethno-nationalists, and the Christian Traditionalists with another contingent of Ethno-nationalists.



The future lies with the Techno-capitalists, whether they achieve more power in the West or not. The Christians cannot countenance the nano- and bio-tech revolutions. If empowered, they will crash the technoplex and render their realm geopolitically prostrate, as Land's "relentlessly self-enhancing" oriental realms scout new destinies. As to the Ethnos, though their present importance shines clearly through dusky leftist miasmas, what does the meaning of ethnicity reduce to when time comes that all humanoid inceptions aspire to become genetically engineered triumphs of power and aesthetics? Their perspective on reality would have to evolve so radically in face of such techno-leaps as to vanish their identity. Or, they could turn techno-denialist like the Christians. Either way, tide-taken relics of advancing storms, the time of the Ethnos draws down . Science has grown to the dimensions of a Demiurge--learned to throw lightning--and, cast under His dominion, the lesser deities will learn their place soon enough, or be new made in his image.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Some Race Psychology, the Jews, the State

In thinking about the perversities of human psychology, the last half-century of "white guilt" struck me as an especially extreme example. A large part of this process derives from the escalating social status competition among whites to prove their empathy and spiritual generosity. Beyond that I think there is a major current unmentioned: the deep pleasure the American Jews derive from stoking the racial antagonism between black and white--and from aggressively portraying whites as always in the wrong. The atavistic Jewish assumption that the Outsider (like the Jew) must be the victim by definition, but presumptively superior at bottom, plays out endlessly in favor of blacks in the Jewish dominated spheres of the media and academia. These power centers, source springs of contemporary thought, were overtaken by our Jews in the sixties, whereupon they assumed script-writing duties from the native strain of pseudo-egalitarians, the Brahmins, and became the marketers and arbiters of the West's new ruling ideology, cultural Marxism. This hardly surprises given that the European Jews invented this ideology and the Brahminate was led by the logical extrapolation of its own super-Protestantism to cede power to a people deemed, by themselves and the Brahmins, to be morally superior. And do I state anything more than a tautology in noting that this ideology serves Jewish ends? But, to be fair to the Jews in America, whether they merely pressed further the trend that the Brahmins had long since commenced or someway twisted or intensified it remains dubious. Whether the Brahmins would have continued thuswise and thusfar absent Jewish pressure and influence remains very much debatable. What is unacceptable, however, in a sense that does not depend on the answers to these issues of responsibility, is the prohibition on any criticism of Jews. They are the best propagandists around--the most powerful in the world today, since they ride the American tiger. To let them run loose without organized criticism or resistance, our modus operandi for at least 45 years, will unleash yet more national disintegration, and dissolution of tradition, strength, will, liberty, healthy moral perspective. A nation without a national religion, one which at least dominates the moral perspective of the elite, will always tend toward spiritual collapse. Cultural Marxism is not a true religion. It is propaganda, a web of words, a self-referential system, a circle of deceit ever-morphing into more destructive patterns of social organization, an open Jewish conspiracy from which only the Jews have any chance of gathering strength, and that only by dispersing the power of competing interests and shaping the competition to favor their particular talents (intellect, with all the advantages that confers in a highly complex propagandistic-bureaucratic-technological civilization, and ethnic networking). The hypocrisy is impressive: the Jews support policies which splinter America along ethnic lines and set the various ethnicities against each other, then proclaim themselves transcendent above the fray, immaculate and past criticism.
 
Given the propensities of the Jews in America and Europe, anti-Semitism among the masses is only surprising when absent. The range of knowledge, subtleties, distinctions, arguments, counterarguments, and context necessary to evade the temptation of anti-Semitism is not a trifling challenge. When the masses escape from anti-Semitism it happens simply through conformism, when conformity so directs them--though they are, of course, just as susceptible to follow conformity into it as out of it. To complicate matters still more, the Ashkenazi Jews give great evidence of superior intelligence vis-à-vis gentiles, which leads them to disproportionate leadership positions wherever they choose to apply their talents. Further, many Jews possess a keen consciousness of their position in the world, and it follows that far more Jews than gentiles will achieve a reasonably complete understanding of the two sides of the intricate argument about anti-Semitism. This means these astute Jews assume any outcropping of anti-Semitism must be pure stupidity or pure evil. They are wrong. It is easy for non-conformist people of average intelligence and average knowledge to descend into some sort of anti-Semitism, mild, moderate, or severe as temperament and circumstances may mold them. The Jews rely almost exclusively on their propaganda leverage to disarm these potential converts against them. But, is that sufficient in the long run? It seems that North America is the only place where significant Jewish populations are or were found that lacks significant anti-Semitism. Why wouldn't it be a better survival strategy for American Jews to ally themselves with gentile interests, rather than undermining them at every chance? Perhaps they think that this was the strategy that failed in Europe--a questionable interpretation in view of heavy Jewish influence over European Marxist organizations from their inception. Marxism was, after all, intended to destroy all European traditions and effectively did so where imposed.
 
Since I've veered from the white psychological response to blacks ("white guilt") into Jewish intellectual and political dominance, and from thence into the issue of anti-Semitism, I will note a few considerations of the latter made by other writers. The first two are by a Jewish convert to Catholicism.
 
With this take I generally agree, though I think he underplays the degree of Jewish influence on the left and the possibility that they've pushed us faster and further to the left than the Brahmins intended.
 
Auster's four part solution to the Jewish question in America looks quite sensible, except that it's an example of the characteristic conservative fallacy of thinking backwards, as if we could choose to enter the past rather than the future. But the values are respectable and he makes the crucial point that submission to the leftist strategies pushed by our Jews ought not to be undertaken for the sole purpose of dodging charges of anti-Semitism. If "the Jews as Jews" engage in destructive political policies, they must be opposed. This is not anti-Semitism; it is self-protection. It is a healthy immune system in action--the immune system does not care what a pathogen is called. Whether a policy is Jew-born, black-born, woman-born does not matter: if pathogenic, it must be killed. Auster also makes clear another major conceptual issue: "the restoration of a white gentile majority culture that believes in itself" would reinvigorate America and need not prompt the appearance of anti-Semitism or anti-Africanism, as our current elite seems to assume. I would argue, with Nietzsche, that it is weakness that produces hatred, not strength.
 
Speaking of the great man, I recall a couple of passages in Human, All Too Human. 

Section 475 The European man and the abolition of nations is my favorite example of Nietzsche on the Jews. It's preceded by a section that notes that in ancient Greece the polis, guided by the self-interested prejudice of the political class, was oriented in practice and in (Platonic) theory to achieve cultural stasis--an effort that failed in face of the countervailing tendency of the state to provoke the individual to an intensified pursuit of honor. He also asserts that if culture develops despite the educational constraints of the polis, it also develops without the polis. And for N. cultural achievement, the flowering of human creative genius, is the highest goal of human life. The first part of section 475 then discusses the gradual intermixing of the races of Europe, beginning with the intellectual and commercial elites. He also castigates the madness of nationalism and notes that its promoters are mostly small slivers of society and medieval political relics (odd, since there was little nationalism evident in the Middle Ages). An enlightened European, in opposition to nationalist trends, ought to declare himself "simply a good European and [ought] actively to work for the amalgamation of nations..." N. expects this to reduce the power of the state and favor cultural development. He then proceeds, in the Section's second part, to the Jews and their role in his projected Europe, which I quote complete from my melding of the Kaufmann and Hollingdale translations:
Incidentally: the whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. Therefore, the literary obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as the scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune spreads in almost every nation--and the more so the more nationalist its posture. As soon as it's no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind. Nonetheless I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they've had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical interpretation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: which in a certain sense means making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.
The following section explains why the visionary Judeo-Greek synthesis will soon cast the Catholic Church, for some still an ideal universalist institution, into "shadow and oblivion." For it was founded on fictions and reduced the fitness of its adherents and subjects--whereas what is to come will be founded on science and seek mastery of reality, not of illusions. I would note, though, that accidentally, by way of its severe prohibition on cousin marriages, intended initially to break down tribal allegiances, the Catholic Church, in this respect at least, increased genetic fitness and created the possibility of new, perhaps more civilized, social forms. Its overall effect on genetic fitness, by slandering sex and attempting to enforce celibacy upon a substantial proportion of the population, including some of its most capable members (eg, priests), is another matter of uncertainty.
 
Of course, Hitler and Lenin blew up the tracks and sent the train down a different way than realism or Greek-founded cultural unity. Both put their considerable force of will at the disposal of ideas N. strongly condemned and argued against. Following Hitler's war, the Western elite then succumbed to the advocates of "slave morality," Jews not least among them, but firstmost and foremost of the intellectual advocates and justifiers, having begun this project in earnest well before the war. This infatuation with the basest features and incarnations of humanity spirals ever further away from Nietzsche's dream of cultural apotheosis and the overman.
 
An earlier section (472) in the book considers the need for religion to sustain the governance of a state, and speculates at length on the interactions of democratic governance and religion, concluding that democracy slowly crushes religion, then the state itself disintegrates, leaving only private citizens and corporations--which happens as follows: The rulers and the priests traditionally are co-dependents, and cooperate for mutual benefit. The rulers need the priests because "The power that lies in the unity of popular sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions and has the same objectives, is sealed and protected by religion..." But, among the rulers, this eventuates in a sense of superiority over religion--"which is why free-spiritedness has its origin here." In a democracy, however, religion breaks from governance and becomes autonomous. The rulers mirror the religious predilections of the people, preventing the cynical use of religion for power. Not being a lever of power, the rulers concede its manifestations to the preferences of the people and render it a private matter. Permitting personal interpretation of religion then intensifies religious feelings and splinters a unified religion many ways, as in the Reformation. Interreligious conflict and competition exposes the frailties of all faiths to the most observant; higher men become ever more irreligious. And these higher men are also the rulers, who will start to work to contain the power of religion, now tending toward anarchy, thus transforming the state from an institution sanctified by its priests to one opposed to them. The state is then disenchanted in the minds of the religious. So do the rulers become, in their competition with the religious, statists--"in which development they are secretly aided by the fact that, since their sundering from religion, hearts in these circles have felt a sense of emptiness which they are seeking provisionally to fill with a kind of substitute in the form of devotion to the state." This may be related to the origins of our present dispensation. He then sees two possibilities: an enlightened despotism if the religionists win; but if the statists win they may, "perhaps through schooling and education, in the course of generations undermine the propagation of their opponents and finally render it impossible. Then, however, they too will experience a slackening of their enthusiasm for the state: it will grow ever clearer that" there is no basis for a religious sense of the state. "Henceforth the individual will see only that side of [the state] that promises to be useful or threatens to be harmful to him, and will bend all his efforts to acquiring influence upon it." This will produce instability, alternating governments.
None of the measures effected by a government will be guaranteed continuity; everyone will draw back from undertakings that require great tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature. No one will feel towards a law any greater obligation than that of bowing for the moment to the force which backs up the law: one will then at once set to work to subvert it with a new force, the creation of a new majority. Finally--one can say this with certainty--distrust of all government, insight into the uselessness and destructiveness of the short-winded struggles will impel men to a quite novel resolve: the resolve to do away with the concept of the state, to the abolition of the distinction between public and private. Private companies will step by step absorb the business of the state...Disregard for and the decline and death of the state, the liberation of the private person (I take care not to say: of the individual) is the consequence of the democratic conception of the state; it is in this that its mission lies...The prospect presented by this certain decay is, however, not in every respect an unhappy one: the prudence and self-interest of men are of all their qualities the best developed; if the state is no longer equal to the demands of these forces then the last thing that will ensue is chaos: an invention more suited to their purpose than the state was will gain victory over the state. How many an organizing principle has mankind not seen die out...To work for the dissemination and realization of this notion is another thing, to be sure: one has to have a very presumptuous idea of one's own intelligence and scarcely half an understanding of history to set one's hand to the plough already--while no one can yet show what seedcorn is afterwards to be scattered on the riven soil.  
The problem with the withering away of the state, whether envisioned by Marx or Nietzsche, is the same problem that Shaw laughed at: "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." Nations operate in contact with other nations. A healthy nation sees an ungoverned region as a standing invitation to conquer, unless it's not worth conquering (see, Somalia). Perhaps sufficient corporate determination to organize a defense could change this calculus, at least to the point that it becomes too expensive and (after warfare's damage to people and plant) unrewarding to conquer. Or, of course, the dreams of our elites could manifest, we could achieve one world government, which would then be secure enough, in theory, to wither away--there being no remaining policemen. Yet the furthest overreaches of statism, whether in the USSR or Sweden, do not disintegrate the state. It seems that, having won the domestic battles against religious and other conservative opponents, the Western statists at least have now reoriented their state religion to battle foreign threats to their statism and to invite in such threats as immigrants, deemed future converts to statism. For example, they wish to vanquish the Islamism of their immigrant masses, then go abroad as well to undermine that religion on its native soil. These statists are specialists in propaganda and they trust in its endless efficacy against all resistance. And they hit upon, even in N.'s time the centripetal social force of governmental welfare programs, now advanced to the stage of rendering most of the population materially dependent upon the state. Thus have they achieved a firm grip on the thoughts of the citizenry and on their needful resources. The people do not see the pointlessness of the state because they have become, in crucial ways, integral to it. They have come to believe that they are the state: l'Etat, c'est nous.  But, this notion of the disintegration of the state aside, most of Nietzsche's narrative played out as anticipated. Only the endgame presents more madness than he thought to project.
 
He follows this lengthy meditation with section 473 Socialism with regard to its means:
Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community...it requires a more complete subservience of the citizen to the absolute state than has ever existed before; and since it can no longer even count on the ancient religious piety towards the state but has, rather, involuntarily to work ceaselessly for its abolition--because, that is, it works for the abolition of all existing states--socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the  most extreme terrorism...Socialism can serve to teach, in a truly brutal and impressive fashion, what danger there lies in all accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the state itself.
The tide did turn against the state in the seventies and eighties. Thatcher, Reagan, Deng, and Gorbachev rode or succumbed to this turn--though the causes extended the beyond the impiousness and moral depravity of socialist states. But, the economic motive, large as it was, cannot be cleanly separated from the moral climate. The dehumanization inflicted by socialist bureaucracy was enough to diminished economic output by process of demoralization. This was superadded to the unworkable attempt to use central planning to organize the economy, instead of financial incentives and market signals. Nietzsche once again underestimated the madness of succeeding generations, which managed to draw out the misery of hard socialism for as long as three generations, rather than consigning their failed experiments to quick deaths.

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading..." --Laurence Sterne. A good book of aphorisms, such as Nietzsche's permits one to revel in the surface delight that the whole thing is a series of digressions--though, when read closely, very little of it is truly digressive.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Rethinking Conservatism

The problem with conservatism in America is that it always loses. It was losing before the land was even settled. The Puritans were the leftists of their time, too leftist to remain in the most leftist nation in the world, and America has adopted the spirit of the Puritans to guide its political and social development. As Orwell made clear, the end game of leftism is the abolition of memory, the imprisonment of the mind, the coercive imposition of equal conditions of body and mind for all people--in other words, the most absolute tyranny ever conceived--but never thus far fully implemented.The Soviet Union was merely a primitive and premature attempt in this direction. Our elites envision a purer achievement. They are more clever and, technologically, much better equipped to pursue their end. Chinese elites posit a similar goal in the long run, though their wonderful new infatuation with Leninist capitalism has temporarily diverted their attention. The world lies at the feet of this double hegemony.

The following website offers a summary of the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, who has an unconventional notion of how conservatives (renamed reactionaries to escape the taint of centuries of retreat) may finally start winning in America (and by extension throughout the American imperium) and revive American fortunes and save us from the usual fate of empires. Moldbug is samizdat for the 21st century. Singapore (surprisingly little emulated) is probably the closest realized approach to this conception of government:


 
My two main issues with these ideas:

1. Classical international law may not be possible for much longer given the continuing spread of WMDs to smaller and smaller entities. This technological fait accompli, provided that it proceeds apace into disseminated bio- and nanoweapons capabilities, would create conditions for either anarchy or a single global state. This is because deterrence does not work for these types of weapons. This would be sufficient to undo the Moldbug plan.

2. The other issue is the risk that some states will be commandeered by psychopaths who, moved more by passion than profit, visit grievous harms upon their people or decide to predate upon neighboring states. However, reactionary arrangements do not create this risk. They suffer the lesser flaw of not necessarily eradicating it. The risk of non-reactionary arrangments going psycho is sufficiently clear from history: any form of government yet tried faces this risk to one degree or another. The reactionary neocameralist form ought to incur a lower risk than most, perhaps lower than any, assuming it is attempted in a civilized nation. Even with global implementation of neocameralist regimes, the requirement of an international balance of power would remain in effect (at least until the problems associated with my first issue transcend known contingencies).

If you're interested in readings from the source, the collected works of Moldbug, as generously and most needfully reorganized by an acolyte:

 
I'm working my way through--verbose stuff, but with compensations in cleverness and humor.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

White Americans have No Recognized Nationality

Another instance of one of my favorite laws in action.
Where does this stuff come from?
 
Moldbug's theory:
1. Academia tells the civil service and the media what to think
2. The bureaucrats (that is, the professional political class) and the journalists use these ideas to formulate an ideology to "guide" the politicians.
3. The politicians pass laws in accordance with "their" ideology, that is, the ideology they are spoon fed by the media and the civil servants (making occasional exceptions for special interests and polling purposes).
4. The bureaucrats transform these laws into regulations that can be acted on.
 
Now, who constitute the elite of academia and the civil service and the media?

Monday, January 10, 2011

The Bad Side of an Ugly Beast

Public sector unions may be the most destructive force in America today (though uncontrolled health costs and entitlements are in the running). And the political dynamic the public sector unions have created virtually ensures the problem will worsen year by year. This is a clear and reasonably comprehensive analysis:
The most essential problems are:
1. They possess monopoly power by controlling schools, police, firefighters, air traffic control, etc. They are in a position to blackmail society, which is what they do and one reason why they should be illegal.
2. They largely control the left wing of politics, which means many of those with whom they negotiate for higher wages and benefits are the same people whose election they engineered--they're negotiating practically with themselves. Self-dealing is generally considered an ethical breach even before actual abuse occurs, since such abuse is considered a foregone conclusion. Even most right-wing politicians cannot afford the political price of resisting the unions. This might expain GED-bearing prison guards making $100k a year and incompetent teachers never losing their jobs and police officers in some cities who collect pensions, on average, of over $100k a year after 20 years' service--the abuse goes on and on because no one is positioned to stop it. They're almost the top predator in the American economic ecosystem--and they may yet become the top predator, since they have effectively no natural enemies. Their determination to corrupt the political process (and their power to do so) is the other reason they ought to be illegal.
3. They use their power, naturally enough, to acquire more power--by financing politicians, by forcing the expansion of the unionized workforce, by telling their members whom to vote for.
4. Unions, by controlling the government, can acquire almost unlimited funds, since the government can always raise taxes and apply force to ensure they're paid.
5. People are made better off by increases in productivity. The private sector, because it is competitive, constantly increases productivity. The unionized public sector, having no competition, does not increase productivity except incidentally. Therefore, the larger the public sector is, the less overall productivity there is and the worse off society as a whole is.
The bottom line is that public sector unions are powerful, growing more powerful, disadvantageous to everyone not in these unions, and face no real resistance. They're like an invasive species that destroys everything in its path because it has no natural predators. Public sector unions ought to be outlawed. This is a case in which freedom of assembly may justifiably be limited to conserve the probity of government.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Racial Politics

This is really a warped line of reasoning: because minorities cannot afford to move to Westchester county, the federal government forces the county to pay for affordable housing that must be marketed primarily to minorities. Essentially, the local taxpayers are forced to give handouts to minorities because segregation by wealth has resulted in segregation by race. Once again group rights trump individual rights, federal power overwhelms local government, and welfare cases get priority over taxpayers.
At the end of the day what the socialist regressives now running the government really want is pure equality of result: equal numbers of blacks, whites, asians, hispanics; equal income for all paid out through a federal clearing house for GDP; equal educational results (which means allocating the most resources to the worst performers); equal housing with perfectly proportioned racial mixing; equal health outcomes (not equal health care); equal rights among nations (ie, U.S. = Liberia). In other words they want the Soviet Union, but neutered.
The problem is that all this affirmative action and social engineering has swung the pendulum from the modes of injustice prevalent in the Jim Crow era to new modes of injustice: rather than simply shedding the snake skin altogether, before quite slipping their tail out these socialists return to it again headfirst slithering into the nasty rotting thing--a sick, stupid, back-tracing snake self-hindered and crippled by its own device and trick of perception.
I call them socialist regressives because their instinct to increase equality at all costs is fundamental to the socialist ethic. The regressive aspect is found in the consequences of this instinct run amok: it acts as a leveler, devaluing the importance of the individual and the achievement of excellence in every field; also, their perpetual search for new invidious distinctions and perceived inequalities between groups (not individuals, about whom they do not care) engenders greater divisions among them and increased consciousness of group identity--the result of which is destructive envy and resentment rather than the creative powers and positive incentives that would result from an emphasis upon individual competition.

Friday, November 16, 2007

What it Means to Support Our Troops

One well-intended, but misconceived notion:
"The troops only concern is the mission. So if you don't support the mission, you don't support the troops."

This is perhaps one of the most mismade quasi-syllogisms I've ever seen. Premise #1 is probably wrong, but it depends upon how one interprets what the mission actually is (Bush has changed the definition of the mission several times as the situation has devolved). Premise #2 also depends upon what the mission is. And the conclusion, following these two undefined premises, becomes meaningless. The only way for the syllogism to work is to define the terms or to assume they take their most abstract meaning--that the mission is whatever the President happens to have directed them to do most recently (to be honest, though I attend to these matters, I have a sense, but am not entirely clear as to what that is). But, then it follows that, in order to support the troops, one is obliged to support any foreign policy the President determines to adopt. The problem with this awkward caravan of reasoning is that it works just as effectually for those Iranians who defend Ahmadinejad's foreign policy or for supporters of any dictator or war criminal you may wish randomly to select. The American dream of America transcends these nations, must transcend them if it is to have any particular value beyond the "petty ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking" in which all other nations so shamelessly and exclusively engage.
Policies incompetent or corrupt in nature deserve criticism and ought to benefit by it; nor will the wise and courageous among men neglect their charge to provide it. If the President has any use, he will distinguish smoke from fire, and he will leave the smoke to disperse itself, but he will transmute this fire, at his own forge, into his own new-hammered sword wherewith to smite his enemies foreign and domestic.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Political Priorities



In response to an article by a female Republican that she desired a strong, decisive leader for President, and, in particular, one who conforms to the ideals of manhood presented in paperback romance novels (here’s the link, though it’s not really worth reading: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/06/responsible_adults.html):





I always found it ironic that right-wing party members pride themselves on being strong and supporters of strong leaders--without ever seeming to recognize the inherent contradiction in assuming that those who support strong, decisive leaders are themselves strong and decisive, and prove and enhance their strength by supporting such leaders. In reality, the strength of the leader and that of his individual followers is inversely proportionate--Hitler's strength presupposed the weakness of his followers. The same held for Stalin. Order and responsibility are achieved through enforced conformity and the curtailment of civil rights. It is the weak in spirit who desire to submit themselves to strong leaders, whose fear whelms their passion for freedom and for its concomitant burden of personal responsibility. This contemptible praise of strong leaders does not consist with the small government, libertarian ethos once espoused by Republicans.




Praise of strength for its own sake has always been an invitation to tyranny and to the correspondent diminishment of the individual. My first premise: The supreme political value is the freedom and integrity of the individual. The less of this value permitted and encouraged under a given political dispensation, the lower the presumed value of that system. Much as I would like to place upon the head of the Bush significant responsibility for erosions of individual rights, his misguided policies are of only marginal consequence in the long term. The major, seemingly inescapable trend that threatens to erode individual rights into museum pieces is ongoing, radical technological advance which simultaneously increases the individual's power for destruction and the state's power (and perhaps its imperative) to impose control. This technological trend is like the relentless tide washing in; the politicians are like individual waves preceding or following the tide that will change all things.




I might also note that the connection this rather shallow little woman draws between strength of leadership and "adult responsibility" is highly dubious. Responsibility means providing intelligent, analytical, defensible reasons for decisions, preferably before they are actioned. In this sense, strong leaders tend to be less responsible because they can get away with it.




Comparing the Marine's motivation (who volunteered for the Marines in 2004 after graduating from an Ivy League school) to that of Romney, Giuliani, or Thompson is rather unfair to the politicos. To stay on such a high-pressure, high-reward track for decades in our corrupt corporate and political arenas strongly suggests that these three are motivated primarily by supreme power lust--just like Hilary and Obama, or for that matter Bill and Bush I, Tricky Dick, Johnson, Kennedy (though maybe not Reagan, Carter, Eisenhower).




I sometimes wonder whether most of those men who succeed in climbing such long, compromising career ladders are not psychopaths. It seems almost a precondition to undertake such all-consuming work-lives in a profession inherently manipulative at every level and in all directions.




My impression of the article: the whimperings of a witless little herd animal, or a demonstration of why the enfranchisement of women has proven a misfortune for the male of the species and probably even for women themselves--women are psychologically predisposed to submit more readily than men--ergo, upon their enfranchisement (with a delay of only a few years) the federal government morphed into the nanny state, and now, at the first sign of a threat to domestic security, all the women join the weak-spirited men in calling for security to take precedence over freedom. What do women know of freedom? Their sensitivity to fear floods their sense of appreciation for freedom. They therefore relinquish it at a lower threshold of cause.




Have I now sufficiently distanced myself from all normative political persuasions? Good.




Politics is the pursuit of power and nothing else. As a private citizen my power potential is largely determined by the latitude granted me by my civil rights and the limitations imposed upon me by all manner of government intrusions and presumptions. I believe the government should be granted and left to exercise so much power as consists with its relative, not absolute duty to prevent its citizens from inflicting harm upon each other and to guard them against foreign powers. I consider all other activities to be, at least presumptively, beyond the scope of the government's sphere of justifiable action. I call this political philosophy liberalism; it is intended to promote individual liberty and the “greatest possible development of the type man.” N.